The Effectiveness of Psychological Immunization Program Training on Life Orientation and Adolescent Interpersonal Emotion Regulation

Adolescence is a period of fundamental physical and psychological changes in social interactions and relationships. One of the factors that psychologists are interested in this period is life orientation among adolescents. Orientation of life refers to the ability of people, especially adolescents, to control their emotions at sensitive times and situations and is considered an emotional relation (2). The regulation of interpersonal emotion in relation to adolescents is also one of the most important and decisive issues that refer to the cognitive way of manipulating of information in adolescents. One of the strategies that can effectively orient life and regulate emotion is psychological immunization training. The immunization training program is one of the treatment programs based on the theory of cognitive–behavioral psychology and was first proposed by Meichenbaum. According to psychologists, adolescence is a critical period. Life orientation in this period has a decisive role in adolescents' attitudes toward life and decision–making in different situations. Adjusting interpersonal excitement is also important for adolescents. So, the present study aimed to determine the effectiveness of psychological immunization program training on adolescent life orientation and emotion regulation.

This research is a quasi–experimental study with a pretest–posttest and follow–up design. The study’s statistical population included all junior female high school students (N=9780) studying in 38 high schools of the education district 16 of Tehran City, Iran, in the 2018–2019 academic year. In this study, the purposive sampling method was used to select the samples. For this purpose, out of 38 high schools, three were randomly selected and the students of those three high schools completed the research questionnaires. Then (given that there was only one study group in this study), 20 students who scored less than 12 in Life Orientation Test (Scheier et al.,1985) and less than 108 in Cognitive Emotion Regulations Questionnaire (Garnefski et al., 2001) were randomly selected (as the only experimental group) and received psychological immunization program training. The training program was delivered in twelve 75–min sessions for three weeks. To assess the stability of the intervention, a follow–up test was performed 6 months after the posttest. The study data in the pretest, posttest, and follow–up were collected via the Life Orientation Test (Scheier et al.,1985) and Cognitive Emotion Regulation Questionnaire (Garnefski et al., 2001). In this study, descriptive statistics (mean and standard deviation) and inferential statistics (repeated measures analysis of variance) were used to analyze the data in SPSS software version 24. The significance level for all tests was 0.05.

The results showed that psychological immunization training was not effective on the life orientation of adolescents (p=0.173). However, it affected the cognitive emotion regulation of adolescents (p=0.037). Also, based on the mean scores (pretest: 85.55±7.51, posttest: 130.45±5.82, and follow–up: 127.20±8.89), psychological immunization training was stable after six months in increasing cognitive emotion regulation. The effect size of the immunization training program on increasing cognitive emotion regulation score was 0.518.

Based on the study findings, psychological immunization program training can help adolescents protect themselves in various high–risk situations and improve their emotion regulation.